Williams & Glyn's Bank
Former British bank / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Williams & Glyn's Bank Limited was established in London in 1970, when the Royal Bank of Scotland merged its two subsidiaries in England and Wales, Williams Deacon's Bank Ltd. and Glyn, Mills & Co.[2] In 1985, Williams & Glyn's was fully absorbed into the Royal Bank of Scotland and ceased to trade separately.[3]
Company type | Subsidiary undertaking |
---|---|
Industry | Financial Services |
Founded | 1970 (1753 as Glyn, Mills) |
Defunct | 1985 (dissolved at Companies House in 2021[1]) |
Fate | Merger with parent |
Successor | NatWest Group |
Headquarters | 1 Princes Street, London EC2R 8PB |
Products | Banking and Insurance |
Parent | NatWest Group |
Williams & Glyn later returned as a division of The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and National Westminster Bank (NatWest), consisting of 307 RBS branches in England and Wales and NatWest branches in Scotland.[4] The division was formed because the then RBS Group, owner of the two banks, was required by the European Union (EU) to divest a portion of its business after HM Government took an 84% stake in the group during the 2008 United Kingdom bank rescue package, which the EU classed as state aid. RBS Group was required to divest Williams & Glyn by the end of 2017.[5]
The Williams & Glyn unit had approximately 250,000 small business customers, 1,200 medium business customers and 1.8 million personal banking customers.[6]
A consortium including Kuwait Investments, Corsair Capital, Centerbridge Capital and the Church of England invested £600 million into the business in September 2013,[7] in exchange for equity once the bank was floated in an initial public offering (IPO). On 5 August 2016, RBS Group announced it had abandoned plans to spin off Williams & Glyn as a stand-alone business, stating that the new bank could not survive on its own due to Brexit. The group was to sell the unit to another bank as an asset transfer.[8]
In February 2017, HM Treasury and the European Commission reached a provisional agreement in which RBS would be able to retain the Williams & Glyn assets in return for investing £833 million into a fund aimed at increasing small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) lending by challenger banks and for RBS agreeing to allow SME customers of challenger banks to use its branch network for cash and cheque handling.[9] A final agreement for the retention of the Williams & Glyn assets by RBS Group was approved by the European Commission in September 2017.[10] RBS Group announced its intentions to close 162 of the branches that were to have formed Williams & Glyn in April 2018. The closure of a further 54 branches was announced in September 2018.[11]